Wednesday, September 6, 2017

A Visit to Winchester

I live near a city of great museums, but
I recently drove in the other direction, to Winchester, Virginia, so I could
visit the Museum of Veiled History. It’s
a small, unassuming storefront museum, run by an old community organizer. Yes, he happens to be my brother, Larry
Yates.

Inside, a large room is divided, and tacked
to all the wall dividers are photos and artifacts, each with a story attached. There are photos of slavery’s atrocities – the
instruments of torture, the auction block.
And there are also stories of lost heroes, like Robert Milroy, the
abolitionist general who ran Winchester for a few months and helped thousands
of formerly enslaved people move north before the Secessionists came back. Of course, many heroes have remained nameless,
such as the Black soldiers who risked everything to head back south and fight
their former oppressors.

After the war, there was a brief period
in which Virginia moved towards parity. There
were fourteen African-Americans elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, almost all of whom
had been born into slavery. But there
was also a constant struggle with the white upper class people who had run
things before. And then there was the
Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1902, which took the franchise away from
all African Americans as well as most of the working-class white people. Larry calls this a “coup” since it was never
voted on, just proclaimed.

And then, as Jim Crow became entrenched,
there was Harry F. Byrd, Jr, who ran Virginia as his own personal fiefdom for
almost forty years. He was born in
Winchester, but why are there no statues of him there? Larry says he thinks it’s because the people
there are now ashamed of their native son, who orchestrated a huge, expensive, and
ultimately lost effort to maintain school segregation in Virginia.

The idea of the museum is that knowing
local history is empowering. The stories
you’re told are only half-stories, shadows of the truth, and so you have to
look beneath the veil. What would people
rather that everybody forget? And why?

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Every event is connected to the events that
came before. When we look at the
devastation in Houston, after Hurricane Harvey, we see a history of covering up
porous green spaces with cement. And so
where does the water go, when it doesn’t sink into the ground? And then there’s climate change, a series of
escalating disasters. There have always
been hurricanes, but now they’re fiercer, picking up more water, lingering
longer.

What stories are we telling
ourselves? Some are about human
resilience in the face of disaster, and it’s important to acknowledge
that. But we also need to look back, to
see the chain of cause and effect across time.

Mars just entered Virgo, and this earth
sign is the dominant influence in September, with the sun, Mercury and Venus all
spending most or some of their time here.
Virgo is about figuring out the sensible, practical solutions to the
many puzzles presented by our lives on this planet. What do we eat and drink, where do we live, what
do we use in our daily lives, and how do we manage each other?

The shadow side of Virgo is a tendency
to seek control, especially when things are unstable. And when aren’t things unstable? This planet is incredibly mutable, with
exploding mountains and sensitive weather systems. And we humans are even more changeable, with
our fidgety hands and our constant curiosity.

Control is a way of trying to maintain
the status quo, something that virtually never works. If the status quo was perfect, if everyone
was well fed and satisfied, maybe it would be possible for us all to live in a
static society. Maybe. But our actual world is one of dizzying
inequality, where some people are encouraged to gorge and others left to
starve. It’s a world in which everyone
is urged to forget what happened yesterday, and remember only what we’ve been
told to think.

As long as people are hungry, sick,
homeless, or oppressed, there is absolutely no possibility of long-term
stability. What we have is surface
control, the slick plastic look that is meant to fool some of the people, some
of the time. It’s television stability,
a representation of reality, not the real thing. And of course, here in the US, we have a
president who is an expert in television stability, who has spent all his life
working on the illusion of control.

And so what should you do with the Virgo
energy of September? The best approach
is to figure out what really works. Althea
Gibson (1927-2003), the first Black athlete to cross the color line in tennis,
had the sun, Mars and Venus in Virgo. She
said, “Being champion is all well and good, but you can’t eat a crown.” So this is the month to focus on what you can
eat, what you can use, what needs to be built.

This is the month that begins with Labor
Day, and Virgo is the sign of workers.
One of the myths of our times is the superlative value of “job creators”, people who hire other people to do
things. If these people have value, then
those who actually do the jobs have many times more. The true creators of wealth are those who get
out of bed every morning and accomplish something real.

And if you’re one of those people, if
you contribute to the everyday lives of the people around you, raise a glass to
yourself. Your name may never be known, but
you are creating the world we all live in.
History is made by all of us, day by day, moment by moment, as we figure
out how to handle our human lives, on this constantly rolling planet. Let us watch each other, see what works, and
work together.